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Friday, February 11, 2005
Friday, February 11, 2005
I was driving home last night and "Rocky Mountain High" came on the radio. I was a huge John Denver fan back in junior high school and high school. He came out with an album called "Windstar." It was full of language and sentiment I had never heard or felt before - "and I'm looking for space, and to find out who I am," "the wind is the whisper of our mother the earth, the wind is the hand of our father the sky." I was seventeen or so I think. The back of the album said "I wish to thank Werner Erhard and everyone in est." I wrote to him and he sent me back this est pamphlet. I was too young to register, but a year later, when I turned 18, I did. It was one of the most important experiences of my life. It taught me the distinction "transformation," and, rather than being some heady elitist thing, it was the most grounded thing I had ever been exposed to, and it taught me that I am OK, just as I am and just as I am not, and that I can take all the pressure off to be someone other than Dan.
It was good to hear John Denver's sweet voice last night again. It reminded me of those times back in the late seventies. Those were times of great possibility. In 1979 I went out to spend part of a summer at what I call a kind of granola school John Denver ran in Snowmass Colorado for college students. We slept in teepees and ate macrobiotic food. We took aikido lessons out in the shadows of the Rockies. There was a self-sustaining farm that produced all the food we ate. Buckminster Fuller, the famous mathematician and philosopher who invented the geodesic dome, came out and lectured to just a handful of us seated in a teepee. Werner Erhard had recently announced the Hunger Project, whose commitment it was to end world hunger by the year 2000. Possibility was everywhere, and it was an exciting time to be alive.
The contract with today's times could not be more pronounced. We live in a time of great fear. Great impossibility. Do not forget that when you feel down or when you feel that there's something wrong with you. Remember the times in which we live. Our goal must be to work together - however small the group may be, to begin to return the world to a new era of soaring possibility, where great joy, not great destruction, calls to us from the horizon. We must usher in a new era where new geodesic domes are being created, where there are renewed commitments to grand endeavors like the end of hunger, where people seek consciousness, and where all these things are happening at the same time. Just because this is not the era we are living in now doesn't mean that it cannot be or will not be tomorrow. Remember this famous statement: "Never forget the ability of a small group of dedicated citizens to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has." - Maragaret Meade
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Thursday, February 10, 2005
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street are full of stars for the great icons of film, television, and radio, from John Wayne and Luciclle Ball to more obscure people like Preston Sturges. The sidewalks are black and the stars are red with a brass outline. Above each star's name is a symbol - either a television, a film camera, or a microphone, depending on their field.
But at each of the four corners of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, there is a large cricle - much bigger than the stars - four all together - and within each circle are the names "Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, 07/20/69." I was walking down that street a couple of nights ago when three young women passed one of the circles, and one asked the other who these people were, and her friend responded, "Oh that's the shuttle." My head spun around as if someone had just called my mother a name and I said, in a friendly way, "The shuttle? The shuttle? No - no - no - these are the three men who walked on the moon - what kind of space fans are you people?" They laughed and we talked about it for a second and moved on. But the moment said a million things to me about our world. Our young people have forgotten that we have been to the moon. Or they don't even know. Moreover, they certainly don't know the miraculous story of how we got there - in nine years, with no computers any more powerful than a calculator - not just for guiding the ship and its systems but for designing the ship itself. We made the commitment to go there before we knew the first thing about how to do it. We believed in ourselves and we made a commitment to an impossible goal, in full light of the knowledge that we might fail and fail spectacularly. We took a risk. We took a chance, in the name of our selves, in the name of our God-given potential.
I talk about Apollo a lot. It's not because I am in love with the moon, per se. I am in love with the bold daring nature of what we did back in 1969, and I am in love with it as a model for how we could solve all kinds of problems that seem impossible to us. John Kennedy, who made that daring commitment, said that, "Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man." His brother Robert said, "The future is not a gift, it is an achievement."
Oh what a glorious world we could live in if our leaders would embrace our potential and set us on a daring adventure. But if they won't, perhaps we must do it ourselves. What impossible adventure might we begin with? What impossible adventure could we undertake in each of our own lives? I think it makes God giddy just to know we're considering it. I know that God loves us, but frankly, I think God is also pretty bored with us right now. God wants new circles on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. Hell, God wants them everywhere...
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Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
This may not be of much interest to you (great way to start the blog) but ever since I read "Atlas Shrugged" I've been bothered by how to reconcile Ayn Rand's ideas about the irrationality of God with my own faith. Her plea to rationality really resonated with me and over the last few weeks my connection with God has been tested. My mind has pushed God out of my day-to-day experience.
I read something by Thmas Merton a few days ago that goes a long way, if not all the way, toward reconciling this conflict:
"I know that many people are, or call themselves, 'atheists' simply because they are repelled and offended by statements about God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms which they are not able to interpret and comprehend. They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they refuse to listen to philosophy, on the ground that it is nothing but a web of meaningless words spun together for the justification of the same old hopeless falsehoods.
What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him."
I have found this test of my faith over the last month or so to be incredibly valuable. Ayn Rand wrote something about hjow a refusal to confront ideas that scare you is to assume the worst. If you never confront them, you never get to a deeper level of truth. I feel God coming back now, and I feel that we know one another a little better for the schism.
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Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Tuesday, February 8th, 2005
I saw this little butterfly in front of my friend John's apartment as he was getting ready to move to a new home. Great metaphor. Werner Erhard wrote in his Hunger Project Source Document of impossibility that, "Butterflies know how it is that catepillars come to fly." (paraphrase)
The butterfly is a transformation of catepillar. I have always found it tough to explain to people the distinction between change - even big change - and transformation. Last night we were at an adoption meeting where they confirmed what we had learned a few months back - that if you're gay you cannot adopt internationally. The only way to do it is to sign an affidavit of heterosexuality. Here's a good example for demonstrating the distinction between change and transformation. A change in this system would be allowing gay people to adopt if, let's say, a heterosexual couple vouched for the gay parents. The context is the same - it is dangerous to adopt to gay people. A transformation would be if the world said something like, "wait a minute, we have all these gay people who cannot have children on their own, and all these children who have no parents - maybe we could solve the entire problem if we made a global call to action for gay people to adopt the world's orphaned children. This is a transformation because the context has shifted from, "It is dangerous to let gay people adopt," to "It is smart and wonderful to let gay people adopt."
Transformation always comes from a shift in context. Change always comes from trying to hang on to the old context with minor adjustments. Understanding the technology of transformation is what will lead to great paradigm breakthroughs across all manner of the world's problems. Change will never achieve this, yet we keep trying to change things. We try to change the conditions of world hunger by throwing a little more money at it. A transformation would be looking at world hunger in a completely different way - e.g., what if ending world hunger could be the thing that proves to humanity that we are capable of achieviong anything we set our minds to? Let us end world hunger within the next ten years." Change exists inside the context "world hunger." Transformation creates a new context called "world abundance."
Change does not make a catepillar fly. A butterfly is the transformation of a catepillar.
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Sunday, February 06, 2005
Monday, February 8, 2005
I picked up this wonderful little book on Friday - took me all of an hour to read. Thought I'd share this piece with you:
"THE PEROSN WHO DOESN'T MAKE MISTAKES IS UNLIKELY TO MAKE ANYTHING. Benjamin Franklin said, 'I haven't failed, I've had 10,000 ideas that didn't work.' Thomas Edison said, 'Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.' Theatre director Joan Littlewood said, 'If we don't get lost, we'll never find a new route.'" Paul Arden, "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be." ("PEROSN" is left intentionally misspelled above)
I'll add to this a little something someone told me today, when I was feeling crazy and more than a little lost in life, as I sometimes do - "God looks out for the crazy ones." Remember that you're in good hands. God loves you. And don't measure yourself by the world's yardstick today, OK? The world's yardstick measures mediocrity. If you're real mediocre, real predictable, totally not rocking the boat, you'll score high. But if you're unconventional enough to be willing to fail and be laughed at, the world will call you a loser. God will call you a joy to watch. Listen to God. The world knows nothing of your potential and your brilliance.
I'm with ya, OK? You be with you too.
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Saturday/Sunday, February 5th/6th, 2005
"If everything seems under control you're not going fast enough." Mario Andretti
This may seem at odds with the Buddha and Thomas Merton and all the contemplative stuff I'm so fond of quoting. I don't feel it necessarily is. There is a time for peace and a time for action. God endowed us with the ability to make our dreams come true. In that realm, I have found that we can be served by living on the edge. This is whence breakthrough comes. Breakthrough gives us joy, and I believe it gives God joy too.
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